Thomas Bridges

Thomas Bridges

Thomas Bridges (* 1842 in Bristol , England; † July 15, 1898 in Buenos Aires , Argentina ) was an Anglican missionary , linguist and large landowner. He is best known for his missionary work among the dying Indian tribes on Tierra del Fuego , as the author of a comprehensive dictionary on the Yámana language and as the founder of the first sheep farm on the Beagle Channel , the Estancia Haberton .

life and work

Thomas Bridges was abandoned by his parents when he was two and a half years old, was placed in an orphanage and was adopted by Reverend George Pakenham Despard. Despard initially worked at a private school in Stapleton, Bristol and then became secretary of the Patagonian Missionary Society (PMS), whose task it was to proselytize the extreme south of America (renamed the South American Missionary Society (SAMS) from 1865 ). Despard was close friends with the founder of the PMS, Allen Gardiner , and traveled to Keppel Island on the Islas Malvinas as superintendent of the mission in 1856 , together with his family and the 13-year-old adopted son Thomas Bridges.

The missionary work of the adoptive father repeatedly took them to the Beagle Channel area, where the young Bridges soon learned the Yámana language , which he himself was to call Yaghana. In 1859 an attempt by Despard to set up a missionary station in Tierra del Fuego ended with the murder of missionaries: Despard resigned from his office, returned to England and temporarily entrusted 17-year-old Thomas Bridges with the management of the mission. With the help of the Yámana that Despard had brought to Keppel Island, Bridges studied the language of the indigenous people and began work on his dictionary of the Yámana language. With Despard's successor, Reverend WH Stirling, he traveled several times to Tierra del Fuego from 1863, where both founded the Ushuaia settlement in 1867 .

In 1869 Thomas Bridges was called back to England and ordained a priest there. During his stay in England he met Mary Ann Varder, a teacher from Haberton, Bristol, and married her. They left England with her and a nine-month-old daughter to settle first on Keppel Island and from 1871 on in Ushuaia . Thomas Bridges took up the position of superintendent of the newly founded mission station, which he held until 1886. In the course of the following years his work in the mission was confronted with the rapid extermination of the indigenous population due to diseases and persecution brought to Tierra del Fuego. With the increasing colonization of the region by colonists, the situation of the population deteriorated noticeably, so that Thomas Bridges asked the mission to settle the indigenous population in a reservation that could be acquired. However, this was refused with reference to the tasks of the mission. In 1886 the Indian population was already so decimated that further missionary work became obsolete and Thomas Bridges resigned in September of the same year.

Bridges took on the Argentine citizenship. The Argentine President Julio A. Roca awarded him the first estancia in Tierra del Fuego for his services as a missionary, the Estancia Haberton , which is still in existence today and named after the birthplace of his wife, Mary Ann Varder. From 1887 the family went about sheep breeding.

His son, Esteban Lucas Bridges , became known beyond the borders of Patagonia through the memoirs El ultimo Confin de la Tierra (1952), which he published.

During his missionary work in Ushuaia, Thomas Bridges began systematic work on the dictionary and grammar of the Yámana language, which at his death contained more than 32,000 words on over 1,000 pages. In 1898, shortly before his death, Bridges gave the manuscript and other documents to polar explorer Frederick Cook , who was returning from the Belgica expedition and who promised to arrange for publication in the United States. Thomas Bridges himself died of cancer in the British Hospital in Buenos Aires after a business trip to Buenos Aires and was buried there at the Chacarita Cemetery in the Chacarita district of the same name.

Years later, the manuscript was published under the name Cooks under the auspices of the Observatoire Royal Belgique. The actual author Thomas Bridges is only referred to in a side note. Esteban Lucas Bridges tried on behalf of the family to uphold his father's author rights, but both world wars thwarted the project. Later versions of the dictionary (e.g. by Ferdinand Hestermann, Mödling 1933) are clearly mutilated compared to the original. A final version is under the title Yámana-English Dictionary by Rev. Th. Bridges. Edited by Dr. Ferdinand Hestermann and Dr. Martin Gusinde published by Zagier y Urruty Publicaciones, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1987.

source

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

literature

• Marco Albino Ferrari: Terraferma at TEA, Italy 2004

Web links

• Cristóbal Marín: Días de ocio en las calles de Londres. (On the publication history of the dictionary, Spanish) ( Memento from September 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive )